The decades between 1955 and 1975 are often considered a golden age for Canadian architecture. Synthesizing global design influences with local geography, climate, and culture, Canadian architects drew upon the crisp lines of the International Style, the organic curves of Frank Lloyd Wright, the raw, muscular concrete of Brutalism, and even the fanciful classicism of New Formalism, creating exciting new buildings for a young and dynamic nation emerging from its largely conservative and colonial past.

Parallel to this Canadian cultural flowering was the heyday of the postcard. For the first time, full-colour photography could be cost-effectively reproduced on a mass scale, and these postcards — Kodachromes, or “chromes” — became a universal medium, widely published and disseminated across Canada and around the world. 

In hundreds of different cards, published across Canada, Modernist buildings were showcased and celebrated. Amplified and enhanced through photographic reproduction, the new architecture was positioned as a symbol of modernity as well as a transformative agent, a necessary condition to further advance the humanistic brave new world that seemed tantalizingly within reach. 

Today, it’s easy to look at these cards with a mixture of second-hand nostalgia and present-day cynicism. Nevertheless, these postcards survive as artifacts of a particular time and place, documents not only of Canadian architecture but of Canadian culture and its varied expressions and aspirations across a vast land.